In sort, I find ways to defeat myself. I recognize that about myself, I know the key to fixing it is to do like Nike says and “Just Do It”.

Easier said than done I guess. I’m still stuck.

But hey, cool theme, eh?

What’ll make this fun/frustrating is that I’m horrible with time management, and I can be seriously lazy. So we’ll see where this gets me. I’ve been thinking about this for the better part of two weeks, so I’m hoping when my 40th birthday rolls around (23rd of December for those keeping track at home and want to buy me something), that I’ll have a basic list of the things I want to accomplish, and a basic schedule of how I’m going to accomplish it.

Wish me luck.

Pretty much, life is the same. Work is work, but at least I have a job. I’ve been wrestling off and on (again, more off than actually on) with Drupal in trying to get it to work the way I want it to work with a new site I’m attempting to create. Kids are back in school and seem to be adapting well. The oldest is keeping on top of things, which is good, and the youngest is enjoying middle school and all that entails.

I bought a truck back in August. She’s a 2006 Tacoma Double Cab 4WD Long Bed. I named her Rosie.

My new truck!

I have plans for her, new equipment, new wheels and tires, etc. Naturally those all cost money, which I don’t have enough of at the moment ’cause I just bought a new truck. Vicious circle.

Gail’s off to Ireland this Friday. Assuming she can kick this cough-bug-flu-bronchitis thing she has. Whatever it is. She doesn’t know, doctors don’t know. Hopefully she’ll be ok to travel, ’cause she’ll kick herself if she doesn’t get to go with her ghost hunting group to Ireland to visit the castles and such.

Soccer’s back in season, but I’m not coaching this year. Had originally planned on going back to school, but can’t afford that so now I’m looking at getting a part-time job to get on top of these bills so I *can* go back. We shall see.

And that’s how my world is turning, in a nutshell. Exciting, no?

Sunday they decided to take the kids to an all-you-can-eat ice-cream festival. Figuring I didn’t need to be party to such debauchery (as I would probably partake to a degree that would leave the sponsors of the event wondering what they were thinking in having an all-you-can-eat event), I hopped on the Harley and went down through the countryside towards Culpepper. Ended up putting about 125 miles on the odometer. It was a great day for a ride and I enjoyed the heck out of it. I have the ‘biker’s tan’ now: white hands (from the gloves), burnt forearm, and white biceps. Gonna look like a barber pole at the end of the summer.

With the one website out of the way, I’m going to try and keep the momentum going and finish my writing critique site.  My friend Treva said she’d help, as she has more experience with Drupal than I, so here’s to hoping we can actually accomplish something. I don’t have a layout, but I want to get the back end working properly and site flow to make sense before throwing it into a layout. That’s probably doing it ass-backwards, but I’ve never been accused of making sense to begin with.

One of those distractions is back – soccer season has swung into full gear. Our team had its first game of the season this past Saturday, which we won, 1-0. It was a great game, and we had some great plays by our keeper. After the whistle blew sounding the end of the game, we were all giving each other high-fives and congratulations and lining up to go shake the other teams’ hands when I noticed Sarah was in tears. I asked what was wrong and she said she couldn’t breathe. Turns out she’d been trying to get my attention the last part of the game because she needed a break and was having a hard time catching her breath. I asked why she didn’t just run over and tell me or the other coach that she needed to come out and she replied with “I was worried the ball would come my way and get past me and they’d score.”

Talk about making dad feel like a heel!

After being able to rest for about 10 minutes, she was back to her normal bouncy self and was happy they’d won. It didn’t seem like asthma or anything, she was just wiped out.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing the normal weekend-suburbanite chores. I did manage to wipe out the front page of a website I’d been working on. That was lots of fun. Thankfully because I had the page still loaded in a browser, I was able to create it with minimal fuss and had it back online within 20 mins. Hopefully the owner of the page didn’t notice.

And hopefully this will make me start doing backups more often!

But this morning, as I traveled down the road and the fog grew increasingly thicker, I was being anything but wistful about the ride. The weather reports were promising a beautiful afternoon with highs near 70, blue skies and a slight breeze. Completely perfect riding weather. As it’s been a nearly two months since I had been out on the bike, I figured it’d be a great day to ride to work. It was a great day to ride HOME from work, but certainly not to.

When I got on the 6-lane that I take to work, the already thick fog grew even thicker, and I couldn’t see twenty yards in front of my bike. Combine that with the condensation that was collection rapidly on my face shield and the traffic coming up quickly behind me and probably not seeing my puny tail light, I decided it was time to get off the road. I pulled off at the next exit, and found a Chik-fil-a for some breakfast. I couldn’t even see the buildings across the parking lot, so I figured I’d stay until I could. Luckily I had a book of short stories in my saddle bag, so I had quite the pleasant morning sitting and reading.

I do love foggy mornings. Just not so much when I’m riding in them.

Seriously, because they have a contract they should be allowed to keep their bonuses? Did these contracts not specificy that it was based on performance? If not, why the hell not?!

I’m going to concentrate on writing more again. I do like to write, but as mentioned in the previous posting, facebook has been sucking up my time. I’m going to try and make a status update just once a day, and only check it once (ok, maybe twice, once in the morning, once in the evening) during the day as well.

Everyone have a nice weekend? I had a dinner theater performance Saturday night that was a lot of fun. It was one of those mystery theaters where the audience gets to ask us actors questions trying to gather information about who committed the murder. It was quite a lot of fun. Because of the nature of the play, there were very few lines I had to actually memorize. Mostly it was facts one where my character was and other tidbits that could lead to clues. So our answers weren’t scripted, they were all improv. Which in itself was challenging and quite a lot of fun and I can’t wait to do it again.

After my performance, I picked up my friend Eric and we went to a poker game. I actually won the game, taking in $140. It was a twenty-dollar buy-in, so not a bad return on my money. I was pleased with how I played, and considering when it was just down to three of us, and I had two big blinds left, I think I did well. And caught some good cards.

The rest of my weekend was chores and working on Drupal. Which is a chore in itself! It has quite the learning curve, and if I had the money, I’d be buying Expression Engine to use for this site I’m working on. But I don’t and the economy being what it is, I opted to go with Drupal. I have a few friends who are big fans of it, so that helps when I get stuck. Hopefully it’ll click and I’ll understand how it works soon. Otherwise, my head is just going to get flatter from banging it on the desk.

I’ve been woefully absent of late. I blame Facebook, as it’s easy to make a two sentence update and be done, and that’s where it seems all my friends hang out.

Perhaps I need to gear this site towards a specific subject. Harleys, photography, knuckle-cracking. Something. Guess I’ll ponder that for another four months before I write something here again. We’ll see.